The Encyclopedia of the Game Industry is a two-volume, collaborative document produced as a class assignment in Dr. Laine Nooney’s undergraduate course, Video Game Economies, taught in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (this course was titled Video Games: Culture and Industry until Spring 2020).

NOTE: This is Volume 1: A-I. Volume 2: J-Z can be found at: https://archive.org/details/GameIndustryEncyclopediaV2

For the assignment, each student independently writes a 1200-word encyclopedia entry on a topic related to the contemporary game industry—whether a company, concept, geographic region, business model, etc. The goal of the Encyclopedia is to produce a snapshot of the industry at the moment the course takes place (currently in the late 2010s and early 2020s) as a public resource for historians in the future, stored on the Internet Archive.

The Encyclopedia is added to every semester, and students must choose new topics; revision of pre-existing entries will only be permitted every 5-7 years at minimum. Students are only marked by their initials and the year and semester they were enrolled in the course.

Style, focus, clarity, criticality, quality of citations, and even accuracy may vary from entry to entry, though only entries that received an 85 or higher are recorded in this document. [UPDATE: the minimum grade for inclusion was raised to an 88 starting Fall 2019]. References are provided for the purpose of verification of claims. Entries have not been edited after submission, except to correct glaring typographic, citation style, or structural errors.

This is an imperfect document. It should be both referenced and celebrated as such.

At the time this document was compiled, Dr. Laine Nooney is an Assistant Professor of Media and Information Industries in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

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